2012: Good for the Movies?

Some guy with a glass of wine said the other night that 2012 has been a weak year for movies. I stopped him right there and said “wait a minute” and got out the iPhone and read off the following titles: Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Dark Knight Rises, Magic Mike, Miss Bala, Haywire, Arbitrage, Bernie, Moonrise Kingdom, God Bless America, Side by Side, Trishna, The Three Stooges, The Sessions, Liberal Arts, Michael (Austrian child-molesting movie), Rampart, 21 Jump Street and The Grey. Okay, some of these aren't out yet but that's 18 movies. Add the films I liked or admired in Cannes — Holy Motors, On The Road, No, Killing Them Softly, Amour, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir and Rust and Bone — and that's a total of 25.

I like that “Some guy with a glass of wine” comment. As if anyone drinking a glass of wine is readymade for dismissal. As if Jeff Wells were Woody Allen dismissing Michael Sheen in “Midnight in Paris.”